Now here you are, so hard up since Shithead left, you’d do the thing you hate most.

“Sorry!” the cook says, breathing booze in your face. “We don’t need no waitresses.” Like waitressing is every girl’s dream. You see two: a graying redhead and a mummified blonde.

“I’m here to wash dishes.”

It sounds fake. Like you’re a hired killer, and this is a front. Like some scorned chick hired you to take out this cook. Shemp’s his name, like in The Three Stooges.

Nah, you think. Not him.

Shemp’s like fifty, with this shock of white hair that’s got to be real. A Hawaiian shirt and shorts that reveal too-hairy legs.

He looks familiar: like that “hunk” from your mom’s day who drove the navy Lincoln all over town. Each time, with a different blonde. As he got older, the blondes got plumper, with doughy, made-up faces.

Was that Shemp?

“Ever wash dishes before?”

“No.” It’s true. You’d die first.

He snorts. “Good luck.” And leads you to the kitchen.

Where his girl waits. A chunky blonde in tube top and shorts.

That’s him, you realize. Mom’s first love. Now the cook at Casa Vitale. Little does the clientele know this tarantula-legged fuck is sautéing their shrimp.

Between shots of ’Buca.

Greasy pots piled to the sky. Dishes stacked at a crazy angle, in a sink from like 1910. And at Casa Vitale, you think. Fat roaches scoot up the wall.

“Hah!” Shemp says, when you cringe. “Even the best restaurants got ’em.”

You’ll never eat here again.

Only one automatic dishwasher. For all those dishes.

“Hand me that apron,” he tells Fatty Pants.

“Do it, yourself!”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

You walked into that. On your first night. But they were battling, before. You can tell. The blonde was too quiet, like she was waiting, maybe hoping, to be fucked with. She’s got the craziest eyes going.

The grimy apron is for you. Shemp throws it at you. When it lands in your face, he snickers.

The biggest knife, she took, and is hacking away. Shemp gags, as blood shoots out of his neck. He grabs it, tries to stop bleeding.

In minutes he’ll be dead. But she keeps chopping: chest, shoulders. Now she’s sobbing.

Blood is everywhere: even on you, way over there. On dishes you washed. Like the world is splashed with Puttanesca sauce.

“Help!” you scream, finally.

Till then, Fatty Pants forgot about you.

Luckily, a waitress runs in and screams...

The old blonde.

BIO:Cindy is a New York textbook editor by day, a hardboiled Jersey female by night. Her fiction has appeared in Black Petals, The Beat, The Cynic, Red Fez, Zygote in My Coffee, Hardboiled, NVF, MediaVirus, The Monsters Next Door, Out of the Gutter, Devil Blossoms, 13th Warrior Review, Mysterical-E, and Beat to a Pulp. She has four collections of stories out: Angel of Manslaughter, Gutter Balls, Calpurnia’s Window, and No Place Like Home. She is the editor of the e-zine, Yellow Mama. She is also a thrill seeker, a Gemini, and a Christian.

16 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Some of us writers joke about the various jobs we've had, but I did work as dish washer during my misspent youth, where I graduated to line cook. Neither job was fun, but I got to work with a funny Old Mexican cook, so it was worth it if only to be bi-lingual in my profanity.

Enjoyed the story Cindy. Thanks for the memories and the extra order of Shemp.

From David Harry Moss:Reading Cindy is like being in a fight - the hits keep coming from the opening bell until the knockoutpunch - you know what to expect you just don't know where it might come from - great story as usual

This story felt true. True the way only a real crime can feel when you read about it in the newspaper. You don't know the people involved, but you know people just like them. You grew up with them. Worked with them. And you knew that one night, while drunk, one of them would snap and stab somebody.

Old photos getting doughier faced by the year. A second rate, second hand mother lover with arachnid legs. Blonde mummies slingin' hash and blood with a side of screaming. All because shithead left and went away. Just when you think up, you're down and out, except you're just out the door. And that's the easiest way Mz. Rosmus ever let a reader out of one of her stories. She must'a been feeling generous. As usual Cindy, you're sub-zero frosty. Cool.

Having worked in many a restaurant in my youth, wow! I saw a cook accidently dump his ashtray into the chicken salad and stir it around. And yet I still eat out. Lazy. My son washed dishes all through college. It warped him to the extent he is a prosecutor today.